NYC Moms

Blue Sky Bakery

If you came to my neighborhood (Park Slope, Brooklyn), you would seek out the Blue Sky Bakery as if it were the Holy Grail. You could come over and over again, because the best thing about Blue Sky is they don't bake the same kind of muffins every day. It's always a surprise, which keeps you from wearing yourself out on the strawberry raspberry muffin in the first month and then losing your taste for the place altogether (which of course you have no experience with).

The anticipation is everything. Will today be an audacious day (mango peach) or a classic (wild blueberry)? Will you rejoice or weep when you see banana chocolate chip? This isn't just breakfast, it's an adventure where the stakes are low. Even the least yummy Blue Sky Muffin (probably a bran) is still excellent by most standards. The graph here only goes from delicious to sublime.

On the wit and wisdom of Bill Cosby (or is it Ronald Reagan?)

Recently, the book Deceptively Delicious, by Jessica Seinfeld, has been one of the hot topics in the playgroups and on-line chats I frequent.  The idea that our kids can be forced to eat more vegetables, all the while singing the praises of mommy's yummy brownies and chicken nuggets, has obvious appeal.  The basic thrust of the book is that good mommies everywhere can spend a mere few hours on the weekend making purees of a variety of fruits and vegetables, and then add them surreptitiously to a host of recipes and the kids will be none the wiser (but much the more-well-fed). 

Much of this sounds like a great plan to me.  In fact, I was already employing my own lazy-man's version of Jessica's complex book.  I add baby food vegetables to things like pasta and eggs.  Damn!  I should have written a book.  Except, of course, that the whole book would have said "I add baby food vegetables to things like pasta and eggs.  The end."